Sunday, January 29, 2017

Barron Trump is cute. You don't have to be a Kremlin agent to admit that. But you look at his horrible brothers, Uday and Qusay, and you can see what that poor boy is going to be like in in ten years. It's for the sake of children like Barron Trump that we need to abolish capitalism, so that they can lead normal lives and become decent adults.

Rosie O'Donnell unwisely repeated the rumor that Barron was autistic, and now an SNL writer has been suspended for quipping on Twitter that Barron will become the first homeschool shooter, which is kind of funny.

I don't know how Barron felt about it. Most boys like the idea of shooting things. But he must have been mortified when his mother announced that she moisturizes him "from head to toe" with caviar every night at bath time. Why would you tell people that?

Friday, January 27, 2017

There were people who argued that, if Trump were president, at least there would be some protests when the US started wars. Obama destroyed four countries and was massing troops to march on Moscow and nobody said a word. It didn't seem like a very good reason to want Trump elected, but maybe they were right. Look at the massive protests.

On the other hand, many of the "liberals" are attacking Trump from the far right. If they want to attack his legitimacy as president, they could attack voter suppression, they could attack the electoral college, but all they do is spout war propaganda against Russia.

And now Shia LaBeouf has been arrested again. He's among those doing an "art" installation outside the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. For days, they've been chanting "he will not divide us" non-stop on steaming video. Surely Trump has divided SOME of us.

You have to admire LaBeouf for chasing away an actual Nazi who tried to intrude, but now he's been arrested for attacking another fellow.

I'm terribly conflicted. I hate LaBeouf, I hate Trump, I hate Nazis
and I'm not partial to conceptual art. I'm usually glad when LaBeouf
gets arrested.

In the video linked above, LaBeouf shouts into the ear of a Nazi. The Nazi shouts "1488". The 14 stands for a 14-word Nazi slogan, the 88 stands for the letters HH which stand for "Heil Hitler".

And here is a photo of "1488" stenciled on the side of a van used by an anti-Russian paramilitary in the Ukraine which was backed by the Obama regime. The design on the door was the insignia of the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS in World War Two. The photo is from an article in The Guardian newspaper enthusing over a lady Nazi fighting in the US-backed war against ethnic Russians. The Guardian posted the article on line and kept removing comments from readers pointing out the Nazi stuff:

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

I watched this episode of The Rifleman, a half hour TV western that ran from 1958 to 1963. I watched to the bitter end and was deeply disappointed.

A guy demands to buy Lucas McCain's (Chuck Conners) ranch. He refuses to sell. So the guy hires some goons who lock McCain's son in a shed and brutally beat him (McCain, not the kid).

I sat there watching this with my mother. She thought his son, Mark, (Johnny Crawford) should have shot his way out of the shed and killed a few of them, but they never let women or teenagers kill anyone on these shows and it would be out of character for them to keep guns stashed in a shed. She wanted me to change the channel.

"It's almost over," I said. "He'll kill everybody in a minute."

But the guy and his goons simply give up and leave. They had firebombed Lucas McCain's house, locked his son in a shed and beat him up, but they decided McCain was too tough to give in, so they moved on. I think he should have killed them.

Either that or he should have sold them the stupid ranch. I've never understood the thrill of ranch ownership. It just seems awful to me. How did they make any money? I don't think we ever saw any cattle on that show. That would be horrible, having to slaughter cattle. I know it's ironic for me to say that since I wanted him to kill actual human beings, but cows never did anything to him. They could have sold the ranch, taken the money and moved someplace good in New England or somewhere. He could have gotten a job in a factory or a textile mill.

According to Wikipedia, Lucas McCain killed 120 people over the course of the series---an average of two a month for five years. What was the population of the town on that show? A lot of the people he killed were from out of town, but he still must have decimated the place.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

You know how local TV news used to show these long, live car chases where the cops chase someone all over town usually until the car crashes and someone gets killed or seriously injured? I always found myself sympathizing with the idiot trying to get away.

But I watched an Austrian crime movie which didn't have that effect at all. I kept wishing someone would shoot that guy.

An Austrian criminal takes up marathon running in prison. Prisons are very nice there and they give him a treadmill for his cell. But when he's paroled, being able to run long distances without ever slowing down is like a super power. He's able to run from bank to bank robbing them and even when he's arrested, he's able to leap out of his chair, jump out a window and get away.

Pretty good movie. I hated that guy though. Seems like I would have had some grudging admiration for him.

Reminded me a bit of the Dustin Hoffman movie Straight Time. I haven't seen it in thirty years but it was sort of the same thing, a scumbag just out of the slam wrecks his new girlfriend's life. All he has to do is not rob people. Is it really that hard?

Friday, January 20, 2017

“We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of
aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of
absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and
economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are
representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through
surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past.
There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most
insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots
at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in
experts to tell them which buttons to push.”

Monday, January 16, 2017

A Question of Adultery aka The Case of Mrs Loring
A 1958 British courtroom drama. A snotty rich guy takes his wife to divorce court. He's sterile, he didn't want to adopt, so the couple resorted to artificial insemination. Then he turned on his wife and argued in court that artificial insemination is "adultery".

Tell that to the Queen Mum! Queen Elizabeth and her sisters were conceived this way. And, since they look nothing alike, they apparently had different fathers.

Princess Margaret, Princess Anne, and the adulterous "Queen Mum".

It got an X rating in Britain at the time and was condemned by the Legion of Decency. Anyone who went to it for the X-rating had to have been disappointed. Like a guy I knew who drove across state lines to see Jane Russell in The Outlaw in 1943. It was banned in his state. And they had wartime rationing back then---he and his friends squandered what little gasoline they were allotted to see that thing.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Watched In Order of Disappearance, a Norwegian film about a snow plow driver who sets out to avenge the murder of his son. Pretty good. With horrible Norwegian mobsters driving Maserati's. Available for instant viewing on Netflix.

Scandinavia's image has been suffering for quite a while now, what with the Swedes targeting Julian Assange, inexplicably giving Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize (they WANTED to give one to Bush but the outcry was too great). The Danes, Swedes and Norwegians invaded Afghanistan and took part in the war on Libya. The Norwegians had a horrible mass murder then arrested one of the teenage victims because he didn't have the same haircut he did on his photo ID. They stripped him naked and locked him in a cell. They held him for seventeen hours, interrogating him without his parents or lawyer present. They didn't even tell his parents where he was or that he had survived---his family thought he had been killed.

Long ago, when I watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I thought, "Oh, come on----Sweden has Nazis?" Now it doesn't surprise me a bit.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

We know that the DNC wanted Trump to run. They encouraged the press to take his candidacy seriously, they actively undermined Sanders' campaign even though polls showed he had a much better chance of beating Trump than Clinton did, then, when Clinton and Trump got their parties' nominations, Clinton ran the worst campaign imaginable. They still whine about the free air-time Trump got, but what was stopping Clinton from going on TV? Not even Rachel Maddow could get an interview with her. Clinton's single appearance on The View was apparently too tough for her and she didn't go back. She didn't campaign at all in Wisconsin. Instead, she kept going back to Arizona which she lost anyway. They squandered a fortune on TV ads which only attacked Trump's temperament, something people could easily judge for themselves.

Trump was objectively the worst possible candidate. No one believed he could possibly win. The Republican Party barely supported him.

I don't believe for a second that there was any Russian conspiracy or "meddling" in the election, but, if there was, I'd say it was the DNC that was riddled with Russian agents. For one thing, they're protesting way too much. Their anti-Russian nonsense is so over the top, they've got to be covering up for something. Their anti-Putin crap didn't impress voters before the election----if they believed Trump was a Russian spy, the public was apparently fine with it. What makes the Democrats think it will do them any good now?

So, a 28-year-old married man was arrested in Ohio. He would drive to shopping malls in a company truck, masturbate in the parking lot, put his bodily fluid into a syringe and squirt it on women in the mall. Cops finally found him after two months. He admitted to twelve incidents and told police that he read about it on the internet and wanted to try it.

Weird crap posted on the internet DOES cause crime. We may as well admit it. But what will inspire someone to do something stupid is unpredictable.

We had a double murder in this state that was inspired by a movie. Two idiots watched In Cold Blood and decided they wanted to be just like Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. They murdered a couple as they walked on the beach and fled to Mexico. Police were baffled as to how a deeply depressing movie about two killers who end up on death row and finally being hanged could be seen as inspirational, but pretty much anything, if it's viewed by enough people, will inspire some monstrous act sooner or later.

The movie The Program, (1993) about college football players, had a scene where the characters prove their courage by lying at night on the double yellow line of a busy street as cars speed past them. It turns out that, in reality, cars drift over the yellow line all the time. Two people were killed and others were permanently injured when they tried doing the same thing. They cut that scene out of the movie which quickly faded into obscurity.

People attacked the filmmakers for encouraging such stupidity. But the fact is that millions of people saw the scene in the preview if not the movie itself and I'm not aware of anyone sounding the alarm that it would inspire simpletons to try the same thing. I was more concerned about the scene where football players spit in each others' mouths.

I worked at a car wash with a high school football player. He started cutting letters into his arm using the razor blades we used to scrape gunk off the windows.

"Is that something you saw in The Program?" I said. "You gonna lie in the street next?"

They keep having to rescue hikers who go to the spot in Alaska where the guy in the movie Into the Wild died of starvation when he couldn't get out.

I finally watched Into the Wild. I can see how people found it more inspiring than In Cold Blood, but I wouldn't want to live the life that guy did even if he hadn't starved to death.

Monday, January 2, 2017

Watched a pro-adultery 1960 comedy called The Facts of Life starring Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. I had never heard of it. It was made as they both began their sad declines. Hope was 57, Ball was 49.

Three couples save expenses by taking vacations together. Lucille Ball is married to a compulsive gambler played by Don DeFore. I don't remember what Bob Hope's problem was with his wife. But three couples plan to fly to Acapulco. Lucy's husband gets called off on business but will fly down later and Bob Hope's wife stays behind because their son is sick in bed. In Acapulco, the third couple is struck down by illness and Bob and Lucy who hate each other are thrown together. They soon fall in love.It was a time when you could check into a motel or book a flight and board a plane without giving your real name, although I'm not sure it was really necessary. They had a problem running into people they knew, and they were afraid that if they got divorced that it would be reported in the newspapers.

I was surprised to read that the thing won an Oscar for best costume design and was nominated for Best Art Direction Black and White, Best Original Song, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography Black and White. Produced, directed and co-written by Melvin Frank who went on to make A Touch of Class thirteen years later, another middle-aged adultery movie.

I watched it and kept thinking about the state of Woody Allen's career when he was at that stage of life.